The Works Cited is MLA's equivalent of the Bibliography or Sources in other styles. It is a complete list of all the sources mentioned (cited) in the paper and it does not, as a rule, contain any sources that were consulted in the writing process but that never made it into the actual paper. It must be called: Works Cited, and it must always begin on a new page. Use the "insert page break" function in your word processor to make sure that is always the case (don't get to the new page by inserting empty paragraphs)

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One workaround to include consulted sources that are not directly mentioned in the paper is to add footnotes in which the reader is directed to these texts for a more extensive discussion of certain topics, or for alternative views.

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The MLA Style website provides an Interactive  Practice Template [CLICK HERE] with all the fields in the proper sequence, with the proper punctuation. All explanations to examples below reference the fields in the template. To better understand how MLA works, open the template page and/or print a copy.

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The quickest way to use citation styles is to first identify the type of source you are citing, look up an example, and then replace the information in the example with that pertinent to your source.

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Note that in MLA and in most other standards the following is always true:

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Titles for books, journals, magazines, newspapers, films, TV series, music albums, websites, are always in italics, in the Works Cited and anywhere else in the paper or essay.

 

Titles for book chapters or sections (such as in anthologies or poetry collections), journal articles, magazines articles, newspaper articles, episodes in a TV series, songs in music albums, pages on websites, are always in "quotation marks", in the Works Cited and anywhere else in the paper or essay.

 

English usage for titles is to capitalize all words except for prepositions (of, to, for, with, on, at...)) and common coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.)

 

In in-line citations always use the first element that appears in the Works Cited entry. This allows the reader to quickly find the reference. In most cases that is the author's last name. For sources without an author, the first element will be the title, so the first two or three words in the title are used in the in-line citation.

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